Ted Cruz's Religious Right Support Carries Him To Iowa Victory

originally posted by: olaru12




Whaaa????

That quote was taken out of context.

He was playing "Clash of Clans" at the time.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

And the constitution Ted Cruz would follow is likely the version by Cleon Skousen he learned in an after school program in Houston

Cruz liked sports but soon came under the tutelage of Rolland (rhymes with “Holland”) Storey. Storey, a retired Houston utility company public-relations executive, created a speech contest to instill in young people an appreciation of free-market economic theory.

“It had a profound impact on my thinking,” Cruz said.
........
Using scholarship money as a lure, she urged Ted’s parents to let him enter Storey’s program when he 13.

Moore said Storey instructed Cruz and others using “The Miracle of America,” a set of audiotapes and workbooks by the late Cleon Skousen, a leading defender of the John Birch Society who has been touted in recent years by radio and TV talk-show host Glenn Beck.

source

Skousen presents the Constitution as a divinely ordained blueprint for government, which implements biblical principles
.......
The central thrust of Skousen’s books is that the Constitution establishes eternal principles that can protect the nation against the spread of world Communism. The first and most important of these “ancient principles” is that natural law provides the only reliable basis for government.
52
For Skousen, natural law means God’s laws and encompasses the necessity for “limited government,” the right to bear arms, protections for the family and the institution of marriage, the sanctity of private
property, and the avoidance of debt.
53
Such natural law principles, Skousen claims, are instituted eternally and are not subject to change by mortal legislators.
54
Legislation contrary to God’s laws is a “scourge to humanity” and is therefore unconstitutional.
5

THE TEA PARTY’S CONSTITUTION

a reply to: desert


I'd love to know the scriptural verses they use to support his claim..
natural law, I do believe includes kings, queens and priests, rulers that are ordained by god, usually through bloodline and we to be obeyed, based on the fact that they were chosen by god....
not elected by the people every so often with a well if we agree with their laws we'll follow them.
so well, it seems to me that they can either admit that our current crop of lawmakers have been chosen by god to rule us, or admit that the constitution was based on an entirely new principles, not really endorsed in any way the the bible.

a reply to: desert

Thank you, desert, for sourcing this. Excellent contribution to the thread.

a reply to: desert

I always find fascinating how people, leaders, religious zealots and politicians uses the human made religious believes for the basis of thinking that it will be the ideal way of governing under a man made God.

I guess people tend to forget how man made theocratic governments look and feels like.

Man created religion, man create the human God, man created governments and the rest too, then it uses religion to blame humanity when things do not go the way they want too.

Have any of you actually read the book in question or just one person's musings on it?

It does not in any way call for a theocracy. In fact, it safeguards your rights in ways you would not even imagine by making them untouchable in the eyes of a person who believes in this version because those rights are not to be tampered with by any agency of man on earth.

So, yeah, you have your Bill of RIghts and they should not be touched! So no theocracy; that would be in clear violation.

In fact, the book in question also gives the Iroquois and other pagan and non-Christian cultures credit for places the Founders tapped in their quest to create something that would give us all a clearly different type of nation and government, but all you see is that they tapped the idea of the divine too.

So sad.

a reply to: ketsuko

What "book"? What the hell are you talking about?

This thread is about how the support of Evangelicals/Religious Right Voters (who would like a theocracy) had him "on top" in Iowa. It has nothing to do with them "reading a book."






OOOOooohhhh! You're talking about "the Bible" - right?
Yeah, most of your peers and cohorts haven't actually read it. They just listen to their 'pastor' and believe America was founded by Jesus-worshipping saints, and is currently infested with demons.
Spiritual Warfare.

In fact, the "nones" on this forum probably know it better than you lot.
-----------------
But, if you're not talking about that Book, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Cruz wants to impose a theocracy. Period. He has said as much.
Active Theocrats: The New Apostolic Reformation and The Seven Mountain Domionists

Still in denial?

originally posted by: BuzzyWigs
a reply to: DBCowboy

If you can achieve all those goals without raising taxes, then why hasn't it already been done?

Because 'corporations' are allowed to off-shore, evade taxes, and stash their cash in faraway lands and NOT pay taxes or take care of their employees.

They aren't REQUIRED to participate.......or to pay their employees enough to not depend on you and me to pull up the slack.......
but - their shareholders sure are happy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that's why it has not already been done.

^^^^^This! BuzzyWigs, have I told you how much I love you?

a reply to: gwynnhwyfar

BuzzyWigs, have I told you how much I love you?

I don't think so, but....love you too!!!!!!

a reply to: ketsuko

Have any of you actually read the book in question or just one person's musings on it?

Oh....OOOohhhh!! You've drifted off over to the Cleon Skousen angle.

Right?

Got it.
Now that Rand has dropped out, who do you support? (Huckabee is gone, too, just a reminder.)

Here's a clip from your boy Cleon's wiki page:

Legacy
By Skousen's 2006 death, he remained fairly obscure except among "furthest-right Mormons."[16] U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, himself Mormon, who had Skousen and Skousen's Freemen Institute as patrons when Hatch ran for the Senate as an unknown in 1976,[36] eulogized Skousen on the floor of the U.S. Senate,[37] saying:

Shortly before I announced that I would be running for the U.S. Senate in 1976 as a political novice and virtually unknown candidate—Cleon was one of the first people of political significance and substance who agreed to meet with me and discuss my candidacy.

Are you a Mormon?

originally posted by: olaru12




Whaaa????

That meme is BS. Cruz never said that.

www.snopes.com...

The fact that you guys have to resort to lying is very telling.

a reply to: Bone75

Never let facts get in the way of witch hunts, fear mongering, and agenda pushing.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

I'm sorry, I didn't check. Please come down hard on the lies about progressives as well.

originally posted by: Bone75

originally posted by: olaru12




Whaaa????

That meme is BS. Cruz never said that.

www.snopes.com...

The fact that you guys have to resort to lying is very telling.

This thread has made plenty of extremely good points, so it doesn't confront me that the quote from olaru12 turns out to be just a meme.

I like the name of the Facebook group, where the false quote originated, per the Snopes link! "Stop the World The Teabaggers Want Off!" How fun is that? Satire is only good when it is true.

The Facebook page Stop The World The Teabaggers Want Off is a satirical one that frequently attributes fabricated quotes to conservative politicians. The Facebook group has previously targeted Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, and Phil Robertson.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

You are quite welcome!

If I might add more....hopefully to shed some light on how the conservative evangelical and Skousen's mythological religious US Constitution crossed paths.

Why have evangelicals and Mormons become the GOP’s most devout supporters?
.....
For a sufficient explanation, it is necessary to recognize the importance of the idea of restoration in contemporary conservatism.

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party became committed to taking America back to an imagined past of traditional moral, economic, and political values. How this happened and why it proved so appealing to evangelicals and Mormons cannot be understood apart from the restorationism embedded in both religious communities.

In the broad sweep of Christian history, there have been various times when reformers sought to reanimate the faith by fostering a return to the days of the Apostles or of the Early Church. The Protestant Reformation, especially, was committed to such a vision, doing away with what were considered unwarranted Catholic accretions to the faith.
.....
What the decade [1980s] marks is the beginning of a new restorationist era—one powered by the tradition of Christian Primitivism but dedicated now to the restoration of America itself. In this New Restorationism, the place of the Apostles has been assumed by the Founding Fathers. The object of the exercise is the recovery of what might be called Primitive Americanity.
.......
Moving along parallel lines, the ascendant restorationism of both evangelicals and Mormons must be seen as a response to that raft of changes in American society conveniently denominated “the Sixties”: the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, women’s liberation, gay rights, abortion—to say nothing of long hair, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. The argument here is that these social disturbances activated the restorationist gene in both religious traditions—the way environmental factors interact with a genetic predisposition to cause cancer in an individual.

Or, to switch metaphors, both traditions had in their intellectual armories the conviction that progress requires a return to an earlier, pristine time, and the belief that the American project is intimately connected with such progress. Faced with unwanted changes in society they were anxious to reverse, both reached for the same weapons, and in Ronald Reagan found a politician who understood where they were coming from.
.......
The restorationism of the Reagan presidency was anything but one-dimensional. Along with traditional social mores and old-time religion, it included a return to 19th-century capitalist ideology via deregulation, union-busting, and a revived belief in “the magic of the market.” Nothing, however, was more emblematic of the era than the embrace of constitutional originalism.

Originalism derived from the plausible proposition that if the intent of the framers of the Constitution were not taken seriously, then the document would amount to little more than whatever a given Supreme Court wanted it to mean. So far as conservatives were concerned, that was just the problem with the Court’s determination that prescribed prayer and Bible reading in the public schools violated the First Amendment and its discovery of a constitutional right of privacy that guaranteed a woman’s right to obtain an abortion.

In 1985, the new attorney general, long-time Reagan aide Edwin Meese, announced that the administration would henceforth pursue a “jurisprudence of original intention,” resurrecting “the original meaning” of constitutional provisions—“the plain words as originally understood.”
......
The most conspicuous restorationist movement in America over the past several years has been, of course, the Tea Party. Its very name addresses a founding vision of the country: patriotic revolutionaries protesting taxes imposed by an alien oppressor. In the restored version, Democrats are the occupying force of Redcoats; President Obama, King George III.
....
By the spring of 2010, the allegedly secular ideology of the Tea Party had acquired a powerful theological spin, as conservative media star Glenn Beck toured the country with David Barton, the evangelical publicist devoted to demonstrating that America had been founded as a Christian nation. This year’s strenuous literary effort by Barton to reclaim Thomas Jefferson for Christianity, titled The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, would have astonished Jefferson’s contemporaries, to say nothing of the sage of Monticello himself. Beck, who wrote the introduction, is himself a convert to Mormonism.

He has revived the works of Skousen—or at least ones like The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World, which soft-pedals distinctly Mormon messages. (Writes Beck in his forward, “Promise me that you will read this book cover to cover in the next 30 days.”) The twenty-eighth great idea is: “The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.”

The disguised sluicing of Mormon influences into today’s conservative movement is an interesting phenomenon in itself. Beck, for example, once aired an excerpt of an anti-Communist speech by Ezra Taft Benson without so much as mentioning that Benson had been president of his church. The neo-realist painter Jon McNaughton has achieved viral fame for works such as “One Nation Under God,” which shows Jesus standing in front of a host of American worthies with a copy of the Constitution as a group of ordinary Americans look on piously from his right, and a collection of impious elitists to his left turn away. But although he is a devout Mormon, McNaughton does not advertise his religious identity.

Central to the restorationist project of the Tea Party has been an explicit appeal to American exceptionalism. A concept something like Reagan’s city on a hill and Skousen’s 28th great idea, it was now pressed into service against allegedly anti-exceptionalist Democrats bent on inflicting their godless socialism on the country.

much more of a historical fill can be found in the source

Glenn Beck endorses Ted Cruz

"I have prayed for the next George Washington. I believe I have found him," Beck said of Cruz....the next president, Beck said, "must have less faith in himself and more faith in God, the Constitution and the American people."

Cruz said Beck is "someone on the radio, on TV, really takes time to really educate about our founding principles, to really educate about the core values that came together to form this country, about the core principles behind our Constitution."

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

I have to say I rather agree with you, while I am sure some of this is blown slightly out of proportion, he gives me the creeps too.

originally posted by: Kitana
a reply to: BuzzyWigs

I have to say I rather agree with you, while I am sure some of this is blown slightly out of proportion, he gives me the creeps too.

And as shallow as the American electorate is...Cruz just looks to creepy to be president. Even if his daddy thinks Ted is chosen by God.

www.patheos.com...

a reply to: desert

whoever wrote that has no understanding of what Christian Primitivism is, or stands for. Hate to break it to you, but there are only a handful of primitive Christians left, and they stand against what these evangelicals stand for. They [Primitive Christians] don't believe that Jesus is for everyone but only for His chosen ones, nor do they believe in any sort of national repentance, nor do they believe it is any of our business how others live their lives. Salvation is individual and the rest to live as they choose with a total separation of church and state.

But, a dying breed I think. Evangelicals are not anything like primitive Christians. Totally different beliefs. Just saying.

a reply to: Kitana

Good point. There are some (younger) evangelicals separating out from the far right politics. However, there are many, many voting evangelicals who are still aligned with Cleon Skousen and/or John Birch Society principles.

I must profess great ignorance of the Calvinist revival theology, so I will stay away from that. To me, religions have split so much, it's like hair with a bad case of split ends.

I do have one question.... for whom would these new generation evangelicals vote in 2016?

a reply to: desert

The evangelicals seem to be in support of either Cruz or Rubio. I don't know the difference though between younger evangelicals or older ones, they seem much the same to me but I view them from about the same distance as you more than likely.